The University of Texas – El Paso sits on a ridge overlooking a tangled mess of highway overpasses and freight lines, down on to the Anapra neighborhood of Ciudad Juarez. It is for the residents of the latter, the poorest sector of El Paso’s sister city, a constant reminder of the education and progress afforded “Americans”—a future that is at once, painfully close and impossibly far away for the children who stand clutching the thick metals bars of their continental prison. This desert, reeking of death and stained with the blood of Mexican and Central American migrants, punctuated only by jagged mountain peaks that protrude from the brushland like the jaws of a crocodile, once concealed a network of hideouts used by the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Now it's a graveyard.

“Juarez is constantly on fire – the missing women, the cartel wars – and its artists are soaked in the ashes of this burning,” says Monica Lozano, a Mexican American photographer who has documented the border and migrant crossings for 18 years. She becomes emotional when talking about the thousands of missing and murdered women in Juarez, cases that since the late-1990s have been neglected and unsolved, eclipsed by the extreme violence of the cartel wars that erupted in 2011. Monica wraps up her uneaten burrito: “I lose my appetite thinking of this,” she says, followed by a painful chuckle.

Along the Mexican side of the border wall, we detour on to a barren dirt road that leads us to an escarpment looking out over El Paso—a cold, poisonous, metal snake winding through the desert as far as the eye can see. Every day, thousands of Mexicans and Americans cross at one of the four checkpoints along the Rio Grande to work, shop, trade, or visit family on the other side. The people crossing are used to being exploited, their bodies bearing the brunt of American imperialism manifest in the so-called “war on drugs.” Juarez was at one point considered one the most dangerous cities in the world, and El Paso one of the safest. The contradiction is glaring.

Walking in the brush, we happen upon a pile of teddy bears. Nearby, dozens of articles of clothing, seemingly frozen in time swirling ominously in the dust. How did they end up all together? What happened to each of the small humans who hugged them while being dragged through this scorching desert heat? Monica crouches to the ground and snaps photographs for her on-going body of work 

In the recent past, “replacement theory” inspired hate speech oozing from conservative right-wing politicians has resulted in increased anti-Mexican sentiments and corollary violence. In 2019, a 21-year-old white male who had published a white supremacist manifesto on 8chan, gunned down dozens of customers at the Cielo Vista Walmart Supercenter in El Paso, killing 23 and injuring 22 others. At the time it was the worst crime against the Latino community in US history. There is no doubt that virulent statements made by the former president continues to fuel the churning hatred of his acolytes, rabid bigots who believe themselves to be the rightful inheritors of the land their ancestors stole from Mexicans. The absurdity is astounding.

Crossing the pedestrian bridge from Juarez to El Paso, it’s hard not to notice that most of the TSA, police and border patrol are Mexican American. The transition from colorful, textured Juarez to the seemingly endless strip mall that is El Paso is surreal. And there standing on the wall, the “

,” a pejorative meaning sellouts or traitors, act as proxies for their white overlords, paid and promoted to subjugate their own people. The militarized abscess of the border does not warrant optimism, yet there are those like Monica who continue to bring humanity back to their communities through their artistic practice. Committed to the uphill battle for their people’s collective dignity they challenge the dominant, racist narrative by capturing the lived experiences of communities. It seems for many, that any hope for the future of El Paso lies in the soul of its sister city. Monica says: “Juarez has two hearts, its own, and another for the one that is missing in El Paso.”

All images are the sole ownership of Monica Lozano and cannot be republished or reprinted without her consent. To view her work, please visit: www.

A Tale of Two Realities

JANUARY 2023, NORTH OF IRELAND

Birth of La Trenza, Pt. 1

MAY 8, 2023, CIUDAD JUAREZ-EL PASO BORDER

Birth of La Trenza, Pt. 2

We arrived late, and though jet-lagged, we were ecstatic to be in Ireland for the first time. Our friend, singer-songwriter Declan McLaughlin, had arranged a homestay for us to better understand the history of the civil rights struggle and enduring activism in Derry City in the North of Ireland. Paul O'Connor and his amazing family took us in despite the enormous size of our luggage filled with "just in case" objects, mezcal bottles, and gifts from Mexico. The fact that they had invited one Mexican (me) and four had arrived was already becoming a bit of a screwball comedy, but traveling only a few days in Ireland had shown us that Mexican and Irish humor is very similar. We have both grown thick skin and the capacity to maintain humor in the face of tragedy.

The Bloody Sunday’s Trust commemorative events at the Free Derry Corner and the Museum of Free Derry inspired us profoundly. The movement is a beacon of remembrance and continued learning about what happened during the conflict and the events of that fateful Sunday morning in January fifty-one years ago. Many painful questions arose among us as we confronted the atrocious scale of lives lost crossing borders--religious or political--in Mexico and beyond. How can 

 speak about the thousands of lives lost on the frontier? How is a community like Derry capable of honoring them in such a profound way? And what meaning(s) can we derive from the stories of those migrants who managed to survive crossing or lay buried in the desert?

En route to the opening of my exhibition 

, we walked the streets of the old walled city of Derry in silence, before encountering a mural of a young girl, Annette McGavigan, who had been shot dead by the British Army at age 14. The mural ignited our collective memory of Daisy, a girl in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, who had crossed the border from Mexico to the United States alone, and how she represented herself as a caged butterfly. It reminded us of all the migrant girls, the death of their innocence, how injustice 

 innocence. We all stood in silence, the same type of silence we experienced six months earlier when we had driven to the border wall near Ciudad Juarez.

I don’t speak through words, I speak through my eyes, that is my true language. I stood with the microphone, staring at the images hanging on the walls, connecting to the photos I had made, going back to the instant of taking the frame, what was happening around me and how it felt. From there I spoke, from what my eyes have seen at home to what they were now witnessing in this new place. One we had never visited before, but that made us all feel so much at home, so easily. We felt the comfort, closeness, and strength--sadness and humor all coalescing at the same time.

We had the opportunity to connect with leaders from the North West Migrants Forum during their weekly Social Café. We spoke with members and visitors, families, adults and kids, who had migrated to the North of Ireland from Russia, Ethiopia, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, and elsewhere. Their stories echoed with familiarity, their circumstances were nearly an identical reflection of those who come to the U.S. from Central America and Mexico--the cruelty, the annulation of human rights, and the trauma they live with after crossing the border. There is the loss of freedom, the scarcity of resources, and a vanishing sense of trust and belonging. We tried to absorb as many migrant testimonials as possible, and in the end we cemented future collaboration with the Migrants Forum.

"La Trenza” is a physical and conceptual weaving of objects and clothing that have either crossed borders or been lost along the way. As we collaborate with new communities, the braid begins growing in different directions, becoming more powerful as it unifies stories and entangles migrants and their parallel journeys in different parts of the world. Whether they survived the crossing or not, braiding their stories and their most intimate objects of survival allows us to commemorate 

in places where humans enforce arbitrary borders, from the heavily militarized to the nearly invisible.

I spent a couple of years steering clear of border issues during Covid, due to my inability to keep my eyes open and continue documenting those agonizing realities. But while in the North of Ireland, I asked our host Paul, "How have you been capable of fighting for civil rights for so long? Where do you get the strength to keep going?" He responded, "I will give you the key, it's simple and it's one word: humor!” We took his words to heart as a welcoming gift and reminded ourselves to never let go of this key.

Braiding Histories of Struggle

Two buzzards circle gracefully above dozens of crosses adorned with Mexican, Salvadorian, and Guatemalan flags. Bottles of water, framed photographs, religious ornaments, toys, and teddy bears sanctify this makeshift graveyard. On June 27th, a tractor trailer was found abandoned on this dusty stretch of service road. Inside were piles of bodies of migrants being smuggled to the United States, left to suffocate and die of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Many of the dead were children and young adults fleeing poverty and gang violence, en route with the promise of a better life.

Quintana Road runs parallel to the Interstate 35, a major trade route that begins in Laredo, Texas on the Mexico border and travels north through the centre of the country to Duluth, Minnesota on the Canadian border. It is a dead end. “La boca del lobo” (“the mouth of the wolf") is how some locals describe this dark, isolated stretch of road, readymade for human traffickers to exploit. Aside from the buzzards, there are few signs of life here, save for those like us, who have come to pay respects and absorb the gravity of 53 stolen lives, and the countless families left devastated with no recourse.

In the middle of the DIY memorial, a small cross with a message: "

R.I.P. 53. How many more deaths Gregg Abbott?

" - a reference to the current and much reviled governor of Texas, whose border patrol policies (also for his stance on abortion and gun control) have made the migrant passage north even more treacherous. Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz as expected, blamed the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies, skirting the responsibility for the malicious practices of Border Patrol agents whose well-documented litany of abuses has made a brutal and inhumane situation exponentially more disgusting and unimaginable.

Abbott and Cruz stand tall in the milieu of right-wing conservative lunatics (the left isn’t much better these days) who have taken a stranglehold over the nation—deranged and cruel “representatives” who spend their time dismantling the legal protections and human rights of “minority” communities. They are pushing forward, in no uncertain terms, an ugly, violent agenda of white supremacy, conjuring eugenics and utilizing a cabal of race traders to facilitate the expedited degradation of the country’s moral fabric towards a militarized, fascist state. The one they always dreamed of; the one they feel entitled to as a birthright.

I have witnessed the darkness of society in places all over the world: in slums, refugee camps, and war zones. Yet standing across from this ad-hoc monument to the loss of innocent life - the doppelgänger to the Alamo, a monument celebrating human depravity in “the greatest country in the world,” - I felt in that moment truly defeated, immobilized by a poisonous cocktail of sadness and rage. All the politics and policies, all the lip-service to social change, all the thoughts and prayers, cannot offer a solution to the black hole of human greed. Power and money are the only governing principles in this so-called democracy, and seemingly everywhere else in the world. The US’ greatest export: selfish individualism and violent ambivalence, now the essential fabric of globalization. I honestly do not see a way forward or a way out, but I am reminded that 

We stand in silence watching the buzzards, wiping away the tears that evaporate more quickly than the sweat that pours down our backs in the scorching desert heat. “They aren’t so pretty up close,” my friend says. “But they fly beautifully, doing their work cleaning up after the world.”

Mouth of the Wolf

Growing up in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas has taught me about change and stillness, transitions and numbness, roadless desert journeys, hiding while seeking…. The border is a mirror reflecting a distorted reality, two places crashing into one another and impacting each other, while we, the people living here, stand in the middle observing and absorbing all of it—the birth of subcultures and the daily visual shock that unfailingly pulls us down into the same abyss, time after time.

After eighteen years spent researching, witnessing, and photographing the human impact of borders in different countries, it is very easy to lose hope in humanity. Although I have always tried to find the light in the middle of so much darkness, sometimes I cannot find it, especially while standing in a place that is constantly on fire. For political and humanitarian reasons, it would be too painful to keep my eyes open when the most fragile among us are burning. It is the impossible stories, the courage, and the “talking eyes” of the people I meet that give me the strength to keep my own eyes open. 

The most common phrase I hear is: "There is NO JUSTICE." It is an expression of fragility, a mantra of the displaced that seeks to encompass the gripping journey and the feeling of not belonging anywhere—the complete and utter terror of having no alternative but to carry your child in your arms and walk into the desert toward an uncertain horizon. Most of us could not endure the type of journey that migrants embark upon with such strength or bravery. Their selflessness is the embodiment of courage and love because their decisions are driven by the instinct to protect their families, no matter how desperate their situation. I have learned during these years of documenting border stories that preserving the life of children is almost always the reason a person risks it all and dares to undertake this perilous journey. They are brave because there are no other options.

In July 2022, I reconnected with Siddhartha Joag, who was visiting El Paso with Declan MacLaughlin, a singer-songwriter from the North of Ireland, and Michael Marinez, an artist from San Antonio for an ArtsEverywhere project. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years and I was excited to drive them around and show them a "deeper" side of the border. I picked them up on a Tuesday morning and drove them to breakfast for the classic Burritos at Crisostomo. I was so glad to see they ordered the spiciest of food, so I knew then it would be a fearless day and we could go anywhere. We only had one day, so right after breakfast we went directly to the wall, the strongest symbol of the border, the cut. We parked and walked on the American side and I knew we would be approached by the border patrol within minutes but I still took the quiet risk. We then crossed to the Mexican side and I was so content to be driving them in the silence of the journey. There was no need to talk at that moment. It was a day of sharing personal stories, comfortable silences, writing, thoughts, and personally waking up for months of numbness to this eclectic group of artists.

I hadn’t photographed anything related to the border since "What Remains” (2019), a series of contemporary still-life images documenting the objects that immigrants carry on their journeys and discard before crossing into the USA. I got too close to the caravans, the people, the stories of pain and loss coming from South America and Mexico all at once. I had to stop documenting for my own safety and sanity; it was becoming too hard to take photographs and “keep my eyes open,” then come back home to the experience of being a new mother to Max and Bruno, my two little loves. When the pandemic hit, a few dear friends and I focused our energy on collecting donations for different asylum shelters in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, while we adapted to our new “normality."

Around the same time, I started working on a new project with Dr. Adriana Alvarez, a childhood friend who was also raised on the border and with whom I had collaborated on and off since 2014. We were sharing ideas about how to encapsulate the physical and psychological impacts of the migrant's experience: the trauma of the journey, family separation, bilingualism, cultural and lifestyle adaptations, the aftermath that unfolds after making the crossing itself. These experiences had informed both of our individual life-stories and we saw an opportunity to integrate her doctoral dissertation and my photography to create a stronger conceptual and visual body of work. Soon after, Adriana and her team invited me to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Crown Institute to collaborate on a research project called “Trust and Belonging and Circles de Confianza.” This is when I began to understand the story of migration as a generational process that extends long after families find new ways of living after “settling" in the United States.

I took the ArtsEverywhere team to various sites in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, explaining the terrain and its history. During a drive along the wall on the Mexican side of the desert, memories of “What Remains” came back to life unexpectedly. We found a cemetery of discarded objects and clothes that migrants were forced to leave behind before climbing over the tall, iron fence. We got out of the car and absorbed the scene in the noontime heat of a desert summer. There were dozens of plush toys that seemed to have been carefully arranged under the bushes. As we stood there contemplating what the teddy bears and books might have represented to the children who carried them, it felt like we had all sunk into the sand along with their toys.

Days after, I was speaking with two artist friends, Iris Morales and Mabel Weber, about what happened that afternoon at the border when Mabel came up with an idea. She suggested that we transform the objects into “La Trenza,” a sacred braid woven ritualistically by women, as was done in ancient times, to unify and honor the stories and the lives of those who left the objects behind. Thinking about the act of collecting these objects felt like a punch in the gut, but at the same time I felt I had to do it—in my own way to help rescue and recover some of the stories forgotten in the desert of Mexico. The next day I went back to the site accompanied by my brother Marco, who had offered to help me put the clothes and toys in bags. I had to disconnect from my body and myself in order to touch so many objects that looked like they belonged in a holocaust museum. We left ten minutes later without gathering all the clothes after both of us experienced moments filled with unbearable fear and pain and a very known darkness emanating from the borderlands where we grew up. We just had to leave. At that moment I had no way of knowing that we would travel back to this scenario in our minds, again and again, as we continued documenting stories of migration on the American side.

In October 2022, Adriana and I drove three hours from Boulder to the Rocky Mountain town of Glenwood Springs near the Roaring Fork valley, home to several immigrant communities, where we'd begin the next phase of “What Remains.” The valley extends south to Aspen, where most immigrants find work in the service industry at high-end ski resorts. Guided by the concept of 

—the braid—our intention was to connect and unite intimate objects from the “found-stories” as a means of metaphorically erasing the border by weaving together the journey from both sides into one. Adriana had the idea that participants in Colorado should begin the braid, so we solicited donations from a few families and gathered the objects together—intimate material possessions that had accompanied them on their journeys. During the photograph sessions and interviews that followed, the families shared incredible stories of survival and resolve.

During the trip, we met Daisy, a teenage girl, who was nine years old when she crossed the border with her mother and was aggressively ordered to drop her teddy bear in the desert by the "coyote," the Mexican guide who had been hired to lead them across the desert graveyard to the wall. Her mother explained to us that 

 moment had been the most difficult part of the journey—when her daughter’s most precious belongings had to be left behind in the middle of nowhere. The forcible separation from her best friend, companion, and comfort object represented the ripping apart of the only life she had ever known. Her mother promised to buy her a new one when they reached the USA, but Daisy told her: "It will never be the same, it will never be my teddy bear."

Daisy waited until the last moment before jumping the fence to leave her teddy bear behind. Once she and her mother crossed the threshold, there were no more directions, no more guides, no more roads. They walked for two days before turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents because they could not stand the hunger and the pain. They spent days in a holding tank known as “the freezer,” where they were interrogated repeatedly and became sick because the temperature in the rooms was so cold. After three days, Daisy and her mother were deported back to Mexico and had to find a way to survive and struggle to reunite with the rest of their family who were now living in the US.

Daisy’s story is one of many we documented on the US side of the border. We asked participants: Was your journey worth it? Would you do it again? What objects did you bring with you that where crucial to you and could not be left behind? What happened to those possessions? Do you still have them now? We learned a great many details about how those precious objects saved them or harmed them during their journey.

Yeni, a mother of two, remembered having to decide what shoes to take with her. “It was winter and I chose some rain boots thinking they would protect me from the cold, the spiky desert plants, and the animals we might encounter. But I didn’t think that if nothing can come in through those boots, then neither can anything go out. So my feet got wet and blistered as I walked for days in the desert of Arizona. During the night I would take them off to see if they would dry a little, and the small group of people traveling with me would all come close and all surround my feet with theirs so I could warm them up. I will never forget this gesture that got me through those unbearable days. Of course, my boots never dried.”

“It almost feels like I auto-kidnapped myself,” conceded another migrant we interviewed. “I cannot get out of this country ever and I chose to come here, but the American dream is nowhere to be seen. I graduated with a doctorate in Mexico, and here I am cleaning houses and doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do.”

Unfortunately, this phenomenon replicates and metastasizes along the border. Although there are so many stories to be told, "What Remains” is a platform for visibility and an intimate illumination of the journeys undertaken by 

 and migrants on both sides of the Mexico-US border. Some who agreed to participate in “What Remains” chose to share their true identities, others preferred to remain anonymous, while others asked us to show only the objects that tell a story themselves. This was requested for their safety and protection.

This experience is profoundly interconnected with my personal story, the most sacred place, the only place where I can create from. It has also taught me that my work can only go so far through photography. The revival of "What Remains" with a focus on process and collaboration has given birth to new and meaningful ideas, as well as the potential of a powerful multi-disciplinary reach into the arts, education, activism, and social justice. This is beyond anything that I could have ever achieved alone.

La Frontera, US-Mexico Border